With evolution of technology, UMTS has been introduced as the third generation mobile communication technology, and LTE has come into the spotlight as the fourth generation mobile communication technology.
In addition, with the spread of smartphones, user data capacity has drastically increased, and mobile communication network operators are making efforts to distribute user data in connection with a wireless LAN network as well as legacy mobile communication networks (i.e., 3G and 4G cellular networks) in order to support the drastically increased amount of data.
However, a close link between the cellular networks and the wireless LAN network has not been established yet. In other words, the cellular networks and the wireless LAN network operate independently except for some limited functionality (e.g., authentication).
Thereby, even if switching to a cellular network is not preferable due to high load in the cellular network when a user equipment operating in a wireless LAN desires to re-access the cellular network, the user equipment may attempt to switch to the cellular network without recognizing the load. As a result, the wireless LAN network may fail to properly distribute excessive traffic, and satisfaction of all cellular network users may be degraded due to excessive accesses to the cellular network.
Further, when the user equipment operating in a cellular network desires to switch to a wireless LAN network, the cellular network may transmit information on access points (hereinafter, APs) of a peripheral wireless LAN network to the user equipment. In this case, however, the cellular network may deliver, to user equipments, a list of APs including even APs which do not properly operate, and the user equipments receiving the list may attempt to perform unnecessary scanning and access in order to access an AP that does not properly operate. Thereby, unnecessary power consumption of the user equipments and connection delay may occur.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method to solve the above problems.